Tuesday, 31 December 2013

Sometimes
Christmas can feel too much. There’s so much expectation on everyone to have
fun and everyone has their own idea of what that fun looks like.
This Christmas is the first I’ve spent in my own home,
my boyfriend cooked me and his mum a beautiful Christmas lunch and we all nodded
off into the lovely books we got for Christmas. There was no false jollity. We
had planned to play games like Scrabble and Charades but we were all perfectly
content.
Just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean we should be
content with what always happens. What makes Christmas exhausting and
inevitably bland is all the stuff that is imposed on us. The need to consume as
much as we can as if we’re mice going into hibernation for half the year or the
incessant harping of Christmas music at you from the radio and in shops.
Round and round and round, “Here come Santa Clause,
here come Santa Clause.” You can’t move around your normal life without being
pecked by it. I just want to be with the people I love
and comfortable in my own home, able to contemplate the pagan and
Christian messages of Christmas. Which on the day I could. Finally there was
nothing more to collect from the shops.
Which is why I heartily recommend Eliza and the Wild
Swans. A true antidote to the faded glitz of Christmas. The Bike Shed is one of
my favourite theatre spaces in the South West and it boasts a really lovely bar
which has a clutter of furniture including old cinema seats and a fun cocktail
list. Wardrobe Ensemble have a cast of five and make up all their props from
the laundrette where their fable begins.
Like all of the shows I’ve seen at the Bike Shed it
combined physical theatre with comedy. The company very successfully managed to
fit an epic story, traversing oceans and borders, into the small space.
The company begins its narrative in the
launderette on Christmas Eve where we meet Eliza whose real life is reflected
in the fable. At times it seems a weak link but perhaps the original Eliza was
comforted by the fact that her life couldn’t be more dangerous and
complicated than the fable-Eliza's. They swoop from this launderette scene
into the fairy tale world taking fragmented bits of the launderette to assemble
the new world, coat hangers, laundry bags, broom handles, rubber gloves, net
curtains etc.
There is a very effective scene where the eleven
brothers, played by three members of the cast, turn into swans, their wings
sprout into coat hangers and laundry. Also, a frightening moment for some in
the audience was when the step mother burst into a demonic Kafka-esque
creature, mop arms and red eyes and hideous crawling voice. Another demon with
a laundry bag over his/her head caused one girl to sob. That’s what I loved
about fairy tales and fables when I was little, the horror and the fear intermingled
with the beautiful and sublime.
There are nice, happy moments too, like the tsar
dancing and lots of lovely comedy moments, oh yes, and then they try to burn
Eliza.
There's no attempt to hide the seams of the
special effects, there can’t be in such a small space and a lot of its charm is
in its handmade quality. If you’re looking for a glitzy-slick evening this
isn’t for you. If you’re the sort of person who values creativity and ingenuity
then this is definitely for you.
As an eight year old I would have been equally
delighted by it. The actors keep a fast tempo and you come out feeling excited
and flushed. A very good way to spend ninety minutes of your life.

Saturday, 14 December 2013

Fistfuls of skyHannah
Kent's Burial Rites describes a long-imagined
landscape of sagas and fictions that are so familiar
that they feel like a part of my own narrative.

Northern Iceland, 1829, is barren and bleak and the
characters that inhabit the land feel small and hopeless against the
inevitable bad weather whipping in from the arctic and the grueling
poverty they must endure. There are few rewards materially or
spiritually to living in this harsh, sub-arctic climate. Our protagonist,
the raven-like Agnes, has grown up here. She has lived through thirty-three
winters and knows the hardship of the land. Every rise and fall of the valley
is familiar to her and it seems to be the closest thing she can call home. She
was left as an orphan to its wind-rushed slopes. There is a sense that she
is an incarnation of the land, abandoned and barren.

We're
all shipwrecked. All beached in a peat bog of poverty.

Kent's
book is rich with layers of superstition and the conflicts between humanity and
landscape and the ascendance of Christian belief over pagan tradition;
they make an uneasy compromise in both situations.
At some points this book is confessional and
others it bears the marking of a ghost story. Agnes's past haunts us through
the pages.

"Do
you know what it means, to have a hollow palm? It means there is something
secretive about us. This empty space can be filled with bad luck if we're not
careful. If we expose the hollow to the world and all it's darkness, all it's
misfortune."

The knowledge
that she is not prepared to die and that there is no dignity in her death or
any death is brutal and sparingly described. Kent does not give us Agnes'
death, only the lead up to Friðrik's execution. She leaves us with Agnes'
fear as she hears the axe fall for the other accused.

This
is my life as it used to be: up to my elbows in the guts of things, working
towards a kind of survival.

Agnes
is positioned as the maligned outsider. She tells us how her
mother left her at Kornsa farmstead with only a stone to her name and told
her that if she put the stone under her tongue she could speak
to the ravens. The young Agnes soon discovers that even the ravens will
not answer her.
Kent does not let her off the crime, the story is
more interested in understanding why the crime happened rather than absolving.
It would be a rough soul that did not follow Agnes's story with compassion
but there are moments in the novel when the nagging feeling is that
it's too much for one person to suffer. However, Kent never resorts to
melodrama. Her prose is clear and song-like, rescuing Agnes's soul from the
depression that the landscape is famous for inducing.
Kent's writing is generous and the space between
her words can be filled with our own fears. The setting feels genuine. Kent has done a great deal of research which is unsurprising from a novel that started life as a PhD thesis. She is a
trustworthy guide through the ghost-filled valley.

"What's
the name for the space between stars?"

"No such name"

"Make one up"

I thought about it. "The soul asylum."

"That's another way of saying heaven, Agnes"

On
my edition of the book, the pages are ink stained along the side
which often made me feel that death was always present, creeping
inwards, ready to claim its victims, the very words and language between us and Agnes. The raven feathers on
the dust jacket and the ink-black rim make you feel
Agnes story is diffusing into the pages.

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Three
men prepare to set off for the North Pole in a hot air balloon. Yes, that’s
right, a hot air balloon. The scientists amongst you might groan straight off
but if you’re like me then every bit of you is tingling with excitement. What
daring, foolhardy but magnificent, glamorous daring? Yes I’ll follow you, sir,
in your marvellous contraption with its newly patented system of sails and
rope. What could possibly go wrong? Quiet in the back there.

For
an hour and fifteen minutes, New International Entertainment want to take you
with them on an incredible, picaresque journey destined for shining, unequalled
success that can only end with a great banquet, held by the Tsar of all Russia.

As
we enter the small box room space of the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter the cast
are handing around hot cups of strong Swedish coffee. The more extrovert among
us call out for tea. We are, meanwhile, serenaded by a woman on a guitar who we
later discover is Knut Frænkel, she has a moustache to prove it. The other woman, handing
out coffee, is none other than Nils Strindberg, photographer, fiancée and
second cousin to August Strindberg. She too has a moustache. The crowning glory
and chief adventurer is Salomon Andrée, physicist, engineer and amateur balloonist; he seems
to have grown his own moustache.

Yes,
you did hear right, amateur
balloonist. It transpires that the good captain has not tested his great
patent.

The
three start by playing music, a double bass, an accordion and a guitar. They
could carry on with this sombrous, eastern folk for a whole evening if my
consciousness was the only one to please but it isn’t. They begin a dramatic
narrative that spreads over three short acts. But they aren’t acts, they’re
stages or chapters. The three explorers go from enthusiastic national heroes to
dying, deranged fools in the snow; eating polar bear brains and drinking the
King of Sweden’s champagne.

“Ice
to the East, Ice to the West, Ice to the North and Ice to the South” is their
maddening refrain.

For
me, this is a dream of a story but for some reason there is something missing.
Not enough to ruin the evening or to lessen some very amusing and well-judged
moments but one goes away with the sense that more could have been done.
Sometimes lines were fluffed and sometimes jokes felt flat or too obvious.

Some
of the most moving moments are physical. A projection screen is used to show us
the hopeful young men preparing their balloon with sails for their maiden
flight. These pictures are taken by Nils. Later the projection scene shows us
the sky-ship come down and the men examining the wreck. The elements of
physical theatre work well here as the subjects of the photographs take their
positions.

The
room is full of theatre students. First years. They are exuberant, chatty and
immediately engage the actors when they come in who enjoy the interaction. This
is a perfect theatrical audience. The people here will know what you’re about.
They need no former knowledge of the story, they are likely to laugh at a joke
because it has been well constructed.

There
is a dark humour here which is not easily married with the guffaws heard in the
front and back rows. A twiddle of a moustache might send them howling but a
man’s blackened foot, however unlikely the depiction, should send a hush over
one. A folk memory of so many dead in those icy regions. North, south. History
is cluttered with fallen men in the pack ice.

Earlier
in the year I went to see a Tinder theatre production called, the Last March.
Scott, another ambitious man, set out to be the first man to the South Pole. We
are all familiar with his fate. It’s an old story now. There was no new and
exciting details like Andrée’s balloon but it still managed to hold itself up better. It
kept its pace and its humour was more convincing. It had a very similar dynamic
of three actors playing two lackeys and one glorious leader.

If
I were to recommend a play for you to see, it would be the Last March. I say
this reluctantly, sadly as I watch the three doomed Swedes of my imagination,
picking out their sombrous tune, with only a wicker basket between them and
thousands of miles of cold, unforgiving sea ice. I knew they could have done
better.